Writing on DU is activism, actually

[nashville_brook]

125. it's the "engagement" piece of activism

using the sit-ins analogy, I'm sure people attended meetings for quite some time before the actual events. Of the 100% of the people who attended the meetings to learn, there were maybe 5% who self-selected to do the action, and 3% who made it all the way through training to do the action. Everyone else went out and talked to people at church to teach the message. Or took the idea to another city. Or, they might have spent time with their family educating them about why this was going to be important and why the protestors needed support. The 97% of people who didn't make it all the way to doing the actual sit-in served a very important purpose of lifting up and supporting those who did. In other words, they were engaged.

One of the my criticisms of Occupy was that there wasn't enough focus on how much planning and how much support you need to pull of effective actions. Unless you were on the ground with an Occupy you might not know that nearly every day there were demonstration. We did a mock water boarding at an Army recruiters office. There were bank blockades. Marches every other day, it seemed.

The marches and actions that were effective took a few weeks to get the word out through social media, leafleting and some lucky media coverage before the event. They were raging successes b/c in addition to the 40 or so core Occupiers, we had 2,500 "engaged" people who got the message and showed up. They had no intention of sleeping in the park, but it was their numbers that made the work historic.